so, hey. I know the lore of the game isn't really its focus, but there's a little something that's bothering me. Maybe it's just an oversight by one of the people who did the concept art or whatever, but I'd like to know if there's an actual, official stance on it.



over in the Shadows Quick Start Guide thread here there are images of a city with the architecture of the broken lords, but a population of humans. Is this meant to imply that the Broken Lords cities might just contain humans who live in them that the Broken Lords rule over? or that there are other "neutral" cities around the world where normal humans live that just aren't represented in terms of game mechanics?



Thanks in advance.

I think we went over this in an older thread. I temember saying that I.d loved to see humans as a minor faction, while someone else wished they.d be added to the main faction roster.

Perhaps you can find that thread. If not, then sorry for my confusing post.

The "humans" are basically a generic population that is meant to populate the images and universe of the game with faction-agnostic visuals. If these visuals represented a faction in particular, there could be a dissonance with the factions actually being played or involved in such an event.



This is kind of a trick to circumvent this issue.

I actually like the idea of the Broken Lords being a ruling caste/oligarchy over a fairly large empire of different races, including humans. Their subjects toil in fear of being 'harvested'.

Picrasso wrote:
I actually like the idea of the Broken Lords being a ruling caste/oligarchy over a fairly large empire of different races, including humans. Their subjects toil in fear of being 'harvested'.

right, this would make sense to me because the broken lords are warrior-knights, they're not the ones who are going to go out constructing buildings or dredging dust from rivers - they're the feudal rulers of a kingdom of underlings. I hope the "canon", such as it is, can support this interpretation.

We know several things about the Broken Lords:



A. They "buy population with dust." As a dev stated here, it seems to be a "ritual" where dust, and another being, is sacrificed and turned into something like them. Since the Broken Lords are essentially vampires, think of them operating on similar grounds. There are the "original" Broken Lords, the aristocracy, and they reproduce only by turning other beings into something similar to them.



B. Pacified minor villages remain intact within their empire, but are slowly leached of life and energy (the quest reward, granting regeneration for every pacified village in your empire).



So the way I see it, the Broken Lords "proper", the Lords of the Amber Plains, turn other beings into dust bound in armour, like them. These are the people that you buy with dust, living in cities and being lower in the hierarchy. The villages around the cities are kept intact, but slowly siphoned for their life energy through chapels.



Since there is no system of managing conquered peoples, it's unclear what the Broken Lords do to a city they conquered. Given how they end up not needing food, you can say they "vampirize" all of them. At the same time, when you take a Broken Lords city, the population suddenly needs food again. So it's up in the air and can be interpreted either way.

hyeUSER wrote:
right, this would make sense to me because the broken lords are warrior-knights, they're not the ones who are going to go out constructing buildings or dredging dust from rivers - they're the feudal rulers of a kingdom of underlings. I hope the "canon", such as it is, can support this interpretation.

As I understand the BL Main Quest, there is a disagreement in the direction of Broken Lords' future among the nobles. Some like Martin de Ildan de Suluzzo seek conquest and lean towards soul harvest, the Broken overLord (God, that pun was as dry as Sahara...) that narrates the Main Quest, introduces the faction in the video, and who I intuitively roleplay, seeks the understanding of Dust and depending on it instead of draining lives of others. So provided you follow the Quest and leave Auriga in that spirit, their even-if feudal economy would be towards harvesting Dust more than harvesting their subjects.



The forced dramatic metamorphosis they had undertaken and conflict between honor and lust prevents me from looking at them as someone who is just a smarter, feudal and Dust-fueled Necrophage/Craver.



Strangely, factions that have suffered in the past and now struggle to get out of the inner chaos resonate with me deeply (that is Forgotten and Broken Lords; Ardents and Cultists are already set in their ways, One-who-Meddles wasn't ever influential enough to affect the whole race; Vaulters and Clans are just a merry company; and there is something shallow and unappealing to me in Wild Walkers' hurr durr do we savage or do we build all the things :P even though their conflict resembles BL's one in structure - innovative king, old ways or new ways... ).



But, everything can happen when you leave your planet and need to adapt Still, given the nature of Dust and the ease of its replication I lean more towards them using Dust than life energy - they would end with a Craver-like mindset in the galactic scale.



So this is my lengthy 2 cents to the piggybank of views.

Grzemek wrote:
Strangely, factions that have suffered in the past and now struggle to get out of the inner chaos resonate with me deeply (that is Forgotten and Broken Lords; Ardents and Cultists are already set in their ways, One-who-Meddles wasn't ever influential enough to affect the whole race; Vaulters and Clans are just a merry company; and there is something shallow and unappealing to me in Wild Walkers' hurr durr do we savage or do we build all the things :P even though their conflict resembles BL's one in structure - innovative king, old ways or new ways... ).

Well, to be fair, the king of the Broken Lords is a traditionalist (HONOR!!!). It's Suluzzo's faction that's trying to innovate, which comes to show that not all change is positive.

Suluzzo is actually an intriguing character. The last scion of a proud house fallen into disarray, he is in part doing everything he is doing to bring prestige and power back to his house, and he was quite successful at challenging the king's power. Think of it this way. Suluzzo would not have been that influential (reflected even by the game giving him Influence Boost 2), if many Broken Lords didn't agree with him, secretly or openly.



The king may oppose him on the grounds of principle, but there is undoubtedly an element of power play between them. The king wants Suluzzo out of the way because he threatens his power and galvanizes a significant part of the nobility to disobedience. It was the kind that betrayed and backstabbed him, not vice versa (he would have probably done so eventually).



Another hint of tragedy in the whole ordeal is that it is hinted at that dust is addictive (the process is referred to as "dust fever" in the Roving Clans quest). Broken Lords experiencing a high from sucking it out of living beings might be "chemically" affected, and are not just enjoying it out of pure sadism. The cool parallel is that the 3 dust dependent factions, the Broken Lords, Roving Clans, and Ardent Mages, all display hints of addiction to dust.

KnightofPhoenix wrote:
We know several things about the Broken Lords:



A. They "buy population with dust." As a dev stated here, it seems to be a "ritual" where dust, and another being, is sacrificed and turned into something like them. Since the Broken Lords are essentially vampires, think of them operating on similar grounds. There are the "original" Broken Lords, the aristocracy, and they reproduce only by turning other beings into something similar to them.



B. Pacified minor villages remain intact within their empire, but are slowly leached of life and energy (the quest reward, granting regeneration for every pacified village in your empire).



So the way I see it, the Broken Lords "proper", the Lords of the Amber Plains, turn other beings into dust bound in armour, like them. These are the people that you buy with dust, living in cities and being lower in the hierarchy. The villages around the cities are kept intact, but slowly siphoned for their life energy through chapels.



Since there is no system of managing conquered peoples, it's unclear what the Broken Lords do to a city they conquered. Given how they end up not needing food, you can say they "vampirize" all of them. At the same time, when you take a Broken Lords city, the population suddenly needs food again. So it's up in the air and can be interpreted either way.

I always figured that the Broken Lords acted like that population's "dealers", they force them into this state where they don't NEED to eat to sustain themselves, but in exchange they become dependent on the BL's dust to sustain themselves (as shown when using dust to heal your own BL units), so once another empire conquers them they've lost all knowledge on how to cultivate/hunt/etc... but their need for food has come back, because the lords are no longer there to appease their appetite with their dust magic they're left to their own means to survive (which if you're not careful, many of them fail to do).



Thing of it as the feudal system, or even one closer to slavery, where they own these people, and to make sure they don't run away or betray them, they have taken away everything for them, even basic ways to grow food / education, so even if they were to come out of these situation somehow, they would still have trouble joining another city / finding employment anywhere else / surviving alone. So they create an environment where their servants are like pets to them, completely dependent and with no ability to revolt lest they die.